“My feather is perfectly straight; – it rained Saturday night, and I haven't had any time to curl it over the poker. It doesn't belong on a sailor, anyway, but it's better than a hole right into your hair! It covers up. My jacket collar is all fringy round the edges, and the top button is split. My necktie has been washed four times too often – ugh! I smell rubber!”
Glory consulted her little chatelaine watch impatiently.
“I hope we're 'most there!” she sighed. “If this hasn't been the longest ride! I know one thing – I shall bring my crochet-work to-morrow, and my tatting, and my knitting-work, and my – patchwork! There's more than one way to ‘kill’ time.” She smiled to herself a little. From the cover of the tiny watch Aunt Hope's picture looked up at her, smiling too. Glory nodded back to it.
“Yes'm, I've got everything – I haven't forgotten a thing. And I'm going to be good,” she murmured, as she shut the sweet face out of sight.
The train slowed up. Glory was feeling better because of the little draught of Sweet Face Tonic, and she was even humming a tune under her breath when she stepped down on to the platform. She stepped daintily along with her pretty head held up saucily and her skirts a-flutter. It wasn't so bad, after all, once off that horrid train – good riddance to it! Let it go fizzing and puffing away. The farther the better —
Suddenly Glory stood still and gazed downward at her empty hands, then at the fading curl of white smoke up the track. Her face was a study of dismay.
“Oh! oh! That horrid train has carried off my books!” she cried.
Chapter II
Glory swung about on her toes and marched away to the Centre Town ticketman, whom she knew a little.
“Mr. Blodgett,” she cried, “what do you do when you get off the train and your books don't?”
The pleasant old face twinkled at her out of the little window. Mr. Blodgett's acquaintance with Glory had been enlivened by a good many such crises as this. In his mind he had always separated her from the other Douglas young misses as “The Fly-away One.”
“Forgot 'em, eh? Got carried off, did they? Well, that's a serious case. You'll have to engage a counsel, but I ain't sure you'll get your case. Looks to me as if the law was on the other – ”
“Mr. Blodgett,” laughed Glory, “I don't want to get my ‘case’ – I want my books! What do folks do when they leave things – umbrellas or something – in their seats?”
“Never left an umbrella yourself, of course?”
“Ye-es – three,” admitted Glory, “but I never did anything – just let 'em go. This time it's my school-books, you see. It's different. I don't see how I'm going to school without any books.”
“Sure enough. Well, I'll see what I can do for you, my dear. I'll telegraph to the conductor to take 'em in charge and deliver 'em to you at your place, in the morning. How's that?”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Blodgett. You're a regular dear – I mean you're very kind.”
“Don't change it, my dear. The first is good enough for me,” the old man laughed. He was thinking what a refreshing little picture his small window framed in. Was it like this his little girl would have looked if she had grown into girlhood? He gazed after the Flyaway One wistfully.
It was still early in the morning, and Glory loitered about in the crisp September sunshine with an hour of time to “kill.” There was but one early train to Centre Town, and that left Douglas at seven. It had not been so bad, of course, when the other girls came, too, but now! – Glory sighed pensively. So many things were bad now. The sun might just as well be snuffed out like a candle and it be raining torrents, for all the joy there was in living!
“That was my fourth Latin lexicon,” Glory exclaimed suddenly, with a vivid vision of Aunt Hope's grieved face. “I left two out in the rain, and lost a lot of leaves out of another, and now this one's gone on a tour! Poor auntie! I guess she might as well keep right on calling me Little Disappointment.”
It was an unpropitious beginning for the new term. Glory was obliged to refuse three times to recite, on the plea of her lost books, and double lessons loomed ahead of her dismally. But not for long – Glory never allowed “making up” to dispirit her unduly. Studying, anyway, was a nuisance, and the less time you let it give you the blues, the better. If you hadn't any books you couldn't study – naturally. Then why gloom over it a whole day?
“Well, dear?” Aunt Hope said that night, as they sat in the twilight together; “well, the beginning and the ending are the first day. How has it been? You look happy enough – I can feel the corners of your mouth, and they turn up!” The slender, cool fingers traveled over the girl's face in their own privileged fashion.
Glory remembered the books and drew down her lips hastily.
“I've been naughty, auntie,” she confessed softly.
“Oh, Glory! – again?”
“Yes'm, I'm afraid so. I'm afraid I've – lost something.”
Aunt Hope drew a long, patient breath before she spoke. Her fingers still lingered on the smooth cheeks and then wandered slowly to the tangle of soft hair. The little girl half hidden from her by the dusk was so dear to her!
“Tell me about it, Little Disappointment,” Aunt Hope said at length. And Glory told her story penitently.
“But I think it will come out all right, auntie, truly,” she ended. “I shall get them again to-morrow morning. Mr. Blodgett said he'd telegraph to have the Crosspatch Conduc – I mean the conductor– bring them with him to-morrow. It isn't likely anybody would steal a school satchel of books!” The bright voice ran on, quite gay and untroubled again. But Aunt Hope put up her hand and felt about for the laughing lips, to hush them. It had grown dark in the room.
“Glory, I am going to tell you a story,” Aunt Hope said quietly. “You are to sit a little closer to me and listen like a good little girl. Don't speak, dear.”
“I won't, auntie.”
“There was another girl once,” began Aunt Hope's gentle voice. “She had two things she loved especially – an Ambition and a Brother. She spelled them both with capitals, they were so dear to her. Sometimes she told herself she hardly knew which one she loved the better. But there came a time when she must choose between them, and then she knew. Of course it was the Brother. She put the Ambition away on a high shelf where she could not go to it too often and cry over it. ‘Stay there awhile,’ she said. ‘Some day I shall come and take you down and live with you again. Just now I must take care of my Brother.’
“For the girl and her Brother were all alone in the world, and she was the older. He was a little thing, and she was all the mother he had. For fifteen years she took care of him, and then one day she found time to take the Ambition down from the high shelf – she had not had time before. She took it down and clasped it in the old way to her breast. ‘Oh, ho!’ she laughed – she was so glad! – ‘Oh, now I have time for you! You and I will never part again.’ And she was as happy as a little child over a lost treasure. It did not seem to dismay her because she was not a girl any longer. Women could have Ambitions, she said. And what did she do but get out her study books and wipe off the dust of years! It lay on them discouragingly thick and white, but she laughed in its face.
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